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Exclusive: The Wheeler Interview

Ted quizzes TVR's Chairman on ABS, airbags and safety

TVR's Chairman Peter Wheeler puts his faith in TVR's engineering every time he races

If you spend enough time around TVR owners you begin to appreciate simply from anecdotal evidence, just how safe their cars can be in the event of serious accidents. If however, you read the article in the Telegraph on Saturday about TVR’s T350T, you’d be forgiven for thinking that TVR were throwing cars together with little thought for safety.

Journalist Andrew English obviously has a chip on his shoulder with regard to TVR, but his comments on safety issues will have left many with a highly innacurate perception of Blackpool engineering.

It’s common practice these days for journalists to round off any review of a TVR by pointing out the lack of ‘active’ safety devices in TVRs. Invariably it’s portrayed as TVR’s desire to build red-blooded sportscars without any namby-pamby safety devices getting in the way of enjoyment.

Looking Deeper

I had the chance to quiz TVR's Chairman Peter Wheeler today about TVR’s attitude to safety. The reality is very much at odds with the lackadaisical attitude assumed by many.

Wheeler has a passionate dislike for both airbags and antilock brakes. Not as I thought because they might interfere with the driving experience or present tedious packaging problems but because he believes his cars are safer without them.

T350's come with full tubular steel roll cage

On anti-lock brakes Wheeler happily pointed out that a car with anti-lock brakes will always take longer to stop than a car without, as demonstrated by Autocar’s 0-100-0 challenge in previous years. “The only purpose of ABS is to allow steering in wet conditions
,” he maintained, adding that in extreme situations “most modern cars understeer anyway
”. The systems don’t help panicking drivers he claimed. What was interesting was that his views didn’t come across as bloody-mindedness, but very much a belief that to add ABS wouldn’t help drivers of his cars more seriously could worsen a critical situation.

His attitude to airbags is driven by the same desire to engineer the safest car possible. It’s not driven by a hatred of new technology as has often been suggested. The latest range of TVRs are built with either full roll cages or in the case of the open top cars, a windscreen surround that is an integral part of the chassis and provides roll over protection.

Despite all the legislation that manufacturers have to conform to these days, roll over protection remains a weak point in most saloons. Despite this Wheeler ensures his latest cars are designed to be “relatively safe upside down
” - “proven by customers,
” he quipped.

The use of an airbag in a convertible fills him with horror. In the event of a roll or even the car simply tipping over slowly the driver can at least make some effort at self preservation – an airbag inflating simply pops the head up into the danger zone he told me.

The Philosophy

It was at this point that I began to understand where he was coming from. Being the owner and figurehead of TVR, Wheeler feels a unique sense of responsibility for the cars built by his company. He knows that his cars will be driven hard and fast and he has a conscience to wrestle with. “If someone crashes one of my cars and it’s their fault then I can live with myself. If we were to put an airbag in one of our cars and it ended up killing someone, I couldn’t live with that
”.

It’s that attitude that drives his whole approach to safety these days. The backbone chassis and GRP body may seem like a simple – even cheap – way to engineer a car, but it’s a formula that Wheeler believes provides a perfect balance of strength and safety. He wants his cars to stay in one piece in the event of an accident rather than break in two – “it’s safer to be attached to the body of the car than to be flung off on a fragment,” he told me.

The steel chassis have demonstrated their strength on many occasions but the lack of ‘crumple zones’ concerns many people. Where a monocoque car will compress its chassis and bodywork in the event of an impact - via its crumple zones – a TVR will absorb a huge amount of energy in the glass fibre before the chassis takes any impact.

It ain't pretty but it works

Take a look at any crashed TVR and you’ll often find relatively minor damage to the chassis yet many of the panels will be shredded, mashed or shattered - it’s that behaviour that Wheeler takes such comfort from.

Stunning Curves

Whilst some will joke about the plastic cars from Blackpool and assume that there’s no strength in the flexing bodywork, the opposite is in fact the case. TVR’s stunningly curvaceous bodies provide both good looks and strength. The engineer in Wheeler came out again at this point as he explained the construction methods. “A curved panel is stronger than a flat panel – that’s why our cars don’t have any flat panels
”, he told me.

Whilst TVR don’t have to subject their range of cars to crash testing – due to the low volume of production – they did subject a Tuscan Speed 6 to an offset impact test. The car not only passed with flying colours but was fixed up with some new body panels and new wishbones and then crashed again! The car proved both its strength and its ability to absorb energy whilst leaving the passenger cell intact.

Having spent half an hour with the Chairman I left buoyed by his positive attitude to the issue of safety. Contrary to what I’d been led to believe over the years, safety isn’t an option box they’re leaving unticked, but as ever TVR have found a different way of doing things which they’ve proved works extremely well – even some of us close to their products don’t always appreciate the logic, reason and above all belief that goes into the design decisions.

Omitting active safety features on TVRs isn’t an omission by Wheeler, it’s a positive statement that he believes his cars are safer with his safety features than adopting mainstream thinking for the sake of it.

Bloody good article and great stuff by PW, I and i am sure many others didnt think about the the airbag on a open top pushing you pinned to the back of the seat in harms way in a roll. I for one can say when i had an accident last year if there had been a passsenger airbag my passenger would now have had a fence post sticking out of his chest, fortunatly he managed to lean forward and down and the post went through the windscreen and out the back window not touching him.

BB

victormeldrew18 Apr 2004

He does have a point about airbags in a soft top, you have to admit that. Not sure I'd like to test his upside down claims in the Chim though!

Bottom line is that TVR chassis is massively strong, and very few people realize the energy absorbant properties of fibreglass. The energy required to tear apart all those bonded fibres is enormous, and the chassis is massively strong.

Metal monocoques are cheap to produce; period. Mass manufacturers use them because they are safe, they use them because they are cheap to mass produce. Crumple zones are a sop to crash testing and misguided concerns over passive safety.

Give me the power to accelerate out of trouble, massive controllable braking power, and nimble steering; these primary safety features will hopefully help me avoid any impact situation. If I still screw up, an inherently strong chassis wrapped in a naturally energy absorbant material (from any angle, not just the narrow specs of a rigged crash test) gives me more confidence than being the mushy contents of a crushed tin can.

Have you ever stood on a tin can? How was it compared to standing on a six inch nail?

Look at it another way; what is one of the first, and I think compulsory, chassis mods required in saloon car racing? A full steel roll cage. I guess they don't put much faith in steel monocoques in racing circles. A TVR is a roll cage with wheels on the corners. Sounds good to me!

Griff2be18 Apr 2004

I was unfortunate enough to put one of Mr Wheeler's vehicles into a concrete wall at 70 mph two weeks ago.

4.5 hours later I was able to drive the same car in another race. The chassis was undamaged, despite the huge impact to both sides of the vehicle.

Ok - mine is a race car - but the road cars TVR sell today evolved from the chassis on my race car. They are very strong cars.

rico18 Apr 2004

A truely great article Ted.

As mentioned by previous posters, i also did not realise the problems encountered by an air-bag equipped convertible. I've seen quite a few crashed TVRs on this site and it does reassure me that in all of them the passenger cell has been fine. Similar case with Porsche GT2s which are of a similar gene pool (no abs, rear-wheel drive etc).

JonRB18 Apr 2004

It's difficult to tell considering that no TVR has been subject to NCAP crash testing.

It would be interesting (but extremely expensive) to see how an example of each model would fare.